TfL refunds: the three routes, and the tools that find them

The three refund routes

As of 20 August 2026, the Transport for London refunds hub lists three categories and nothing else. Everything TfL gives back sits under one of them.

Card clash used to have a page of its own and does not any more. The old address now redirects into the refunds hub, and TfL folds it into the incomplete journey refund as one of four listed causes. The deadline did not change. What changed is that there is no separate form, no separate deadline and no separate process, so a guide pointing you at one is out of date.

What TfL refunds without being asked

The single most useful line on TfL’s incomplete journey page is that most of these refunds are processed automatically. It asks you to wait 48 hours before applying by hand, because the correction often arrives on its own inside that window.

There is a second automatic correction for journeys that went over the maximum time allowed between touching in and touching out. Where that happened for reasons outside your control, a severe delay on the network for instance, TfL says it may refund automatically, and that this is normally done up to three times a month.

Closing a card, and the money left on it

The third route is the one people forget entirely, and it is where the largest single pile of unclaimed TfL money sits. A disclosure Transport for London published on 13 April 2026 put the unspent balance on dormant Oyster cards, meaning cards unused for a year or more, at £268 million across 92 million cards as at 31 March 2025. TfL confirmed in the same response that those balances are not ring fenced and are held in the same way as all other fares revenue.

Three things are worth knowing before you close a card:

• Credit of £10 or less comes back instantly at any Tube ticket machine. Above £10 you apply through the account and it usually arrives by bank transfer. Either way the card is cancelled when the refund is made.
• The deposit is refundable only if you got the card before 23 February 2020, at £3 or £5. On cards issued from 4 September 2022 the deposit is not refundable and only the credit comes back.
• A season ticket is refunded on the unused portion, calculated from the date you contact TfL, minus a £5 admin fee. There is no refund at all if under 6 weeks remain on an annual, under 7 days on a monthly, or under 3 days on a 7 day ticket.

Refunds are also available where illness stopped you using a Travelcard or Bus and Tram Pass, and on behalf of someone who has died leaving a season ticket or pay as you go credit.

How to see your own journey history

Every claim on this page starts from a journey row, so getting at your own history is the first job.

• Oyster: register the card to a contactless and Oyster account at oyster.tfl.gov.uk, then open journey and payment history. Without an account you can still check recent journeys at any Tube station ticket machine.
• Contactless: register the card you tap with at contactless.tfl.gov.uk. Registration is what links the card to you, so history and refunds only work once it is done.
• Contactless without registering: TfL runs a 7 day unregistered card service, and as the name says it covers journeys in the past 7 days only.

Every wallet counts as its own payment card here. Apple Pay, Google Pay and the physical card in the same account are three different things to a yellow reader, which is where a lot of incomplete journeys begin.

The 8 week trap

This is the most useful fact on the page. Oyster journey history stays linked to your card online for 8 weeks, and is then unlinked from the individual card. The incomplete journey claim window is also 8 weeks. The two are exactly the same length.

There is no slack in that. Someone who does not check promptly loses the evidence at the same moment the window shuts, and the row they needed is gone from the account at roughly the point the claim would have been refused for lateness anyway.

Contactless history is kept for longer than 8 weeks, which makes sense given it has to justify debits on a bank card. We have not been able to confirm how much longer from any TfL page readable without signing in, so this page does not put a number on it.

Why capping goes wrong

A lot of what gets reported as TfL charging too much is a cap that never applied, and most of those are not TfL errors. Being straight about that is more useful than pretending otherwise, because it is the difference between a claim that goes nowhere and a fix you can make on Monday.

TfL’s capping page sets the condition in one sentence: you must touch in at the start and touch out at the end of every journey, using the same contactless card, device or Oyster card. Its own worked example is paying with your phone in the morning and a contactless card in the evening, which produces two part-days that never add up to a cap.

Capping fails for four reasons, in rough order of how often:

• Mixed payment methods: phone one way, card the other. The fares sit in two places and neither reaches the cap.
• A missed tap: without both ends of the journey TfL cannot apply the cap, and a maximum fare can be charged instead.
• Travelling outside your capped zones: the extra fare is charged on top of the cap rather than absorbed by it.
• A partial week: a week where you simply did not travel enough to reach the weekly total.

TfL asks you to allow 48 hours after travel for fares to finalise before judging any of this. If the cap still looks wrong after that and none of the four applies, then it is worth raising.

The tools compared

There is less here than the search results suggest. Two paid services genuinely detect money for you, one free tool helps you complain, one free guide explains the rules, and one free checker reads a statement. Here is all of it as at August 2026, including ours.

The two paid services do something we do not, and it is worth naming rather than talking around. They watch your account continuously and submit the claim for you, so nothing depends on you remembering to look. For a daily commuter that is a real service, and it is the part of the job people are worst at.

The cost of it is that both need live access to your TfL account. Reeclaim asks for your login and your phone number so it can pass the text message check. Mind the Delay routes the sign-in through a third party and says your password is not what it keeps. Both are honest about needing the access. Whether you are comfortable giving a third party standing entry to an account tied to your bank card is a judgement only you can make, and it is the whole of the trade.

What our own tool does

/tfl-check is free and sits on this site. You upload a TfL statement, it runs the same detection pipeline we use everywhere else, and it tells you which journeys look overcharged. No account, no login, nothing stored.

It does not file anything. We tell you what to claim and you claim it through TfL on the pages linked above. There is no success rate to quote and no payout to promise, because the decision is TfL’s and always was. If you want a full walk through the rules first, our TfL refunds guide covers each situation in turn, and the same comparison for train delay tools is next door.

If TfL says no

Complain to TfL first. Its own escalation description is that it tries to resolve a complaint on first contact, and that if you are not satisfied you should say so and a team manager will review it. Give that 20 working days before going further, and raise the original issue within six weeks of it happening.

After that, the body to go to is London TravelWatch, the independent transport watchdog for London, on 020 3176 2999. There is no charge to you: it is funded by the London Assembly rather than by the people who complain to it.

It covers the Tube, DLR, bus and tram side of TfL cleanly. There are limits worth knowing: it cannot overturn a penalty fare decision, and it does not handle bus driver conduct or injury compensation claims.

Sources

• Transport for London, Refunds, and the three route pages under it: incomplete journey, service delay and unused credit or ticket. All three read on 20 August 2026, which is also when the old card clash address was confirmed to redirect into the hub.
• Transport for London, Keep within maximum journey times, for the automatic correction normally being done up to three times a month.
• Transport for London, Capping, for the same-card condition and the mixed payment example.
• Transport for London freedom of information disclosure FOI-0359-2526, published 13 April 2026, for the £268 million balance on 92 million dormant Oyster cards as at 31 March 2025 and for the treatment of those balances. Read the disclosure.
• The 8 week Oyster history window comes from a Transport for London freedom of information response describing journey history being unlinked from the card after eight weeks, an arrangement it says was agreed with consumer action groups. We have that response through an archive of it rather than from a page on tfl.gov.uk, so it is recorded here as a strong secondary source rather than a direct quotation.
• Transport for London, Taking your complaint further, and London TravelWatch’s own appealing your complaint and where to send your complaint pages, which are the two that disagree.
• Prices and access requirements for Reeclaim and Mind the Delay are taken from each service’s own published pages, read on 20 August 2026.

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